Mountainhead's Jason Schwartzman Thinks Souper Is Just Happy to Be Included

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for HBO's Mountainhead.]

The tail end of May marks the two-year anniversary of the series finale of Succession airing on HBO. It's a fitting act of symmetry, then, that Mountainhead, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong's directorial debut, premiered on HBO on May 31. The end of spring, it seems, belongs to Armstrong's twisted tales of exorbitantly wealthy idiots.

The film centers on a quartet of tech billionaires — well, three tech billionaires and one tech millionaire — who gather at a secluded mansion in the Rocky Mountains for a cursed boys' weekend, which happens to be taking place at the same time as an international financial crisis. The friends, played by Steve Carell, Ramy Youssef, Cory Michael Smith, and Jason Schwartzman, are largely unmoved by the atrocities they absorb via their screens (mass protests, data breaches, some alleged exploding of heads), quickly spinning it into an opportunity for them to gain more power. They speak about it all in a detached manner, with their own messy dynamic taking precedence over the very real fact that the world is burning around them. To these four, this period of global unrest only concerns them insofar as it can make them more money. To describe it in Succession terms, it's all very "no real person involved."

Schwartzman plays Hugo Van Yalk, the organizer of the weekend and the group's resident millionaire (read: the poor one). His friends have nicknamed him Souper, short for Soup Kitchen. At various points in the film, Souper — who has gathered his rich friends with the ulterior motive of securing funding for his meditation app — fusses over whether the sliders are being eaten, flirts with the idea of taking over as president of Argentina, and is eventually forced into the role of scapegoat in Randall's (Carell) ham-fisted scheme to murder Jeff (Youssef) after he expresses reservations about Venis' (Smith) mental state.

With his combination of delusion and wholehearted sincerity, Souper is a bit like Mountainhead's answer to Connor Roy. Ahead of the film's premiere, Schwartzman told TV Guide about Mountainhead's condensed shooting schedule, the particularities of working with Armstrong, and how he sees Souper's place among the group.

Hi, Jason. What's going on?
Jason Schwartzman: Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Awesome. That's really cool.
Schwartzman: No, everything's good. I'm happy to be here, and I'm happy that I got to be in this movie, and now I'm happy that we get to talk about it. I'm still in shock.

Why are you in shock? Shock that you were in this film at all?
Schwartzman: Yeah! I'm pretty happy. I'm pretty happy about it. You know, I'm in shock because I didn't know about this movie. I didn't know Jesse Armstrong was making a movie until they asked me to send an audition by 3:30 the next day. I think the initial hit of it, I'm still reverberating from that. I was about to start recording some music, and I had a whole other few months planned out for myself, and then this happened. So what would have happened if I hadn't been emailed to try to audition? Because it happened so decisively and quickly, you can really play the game of, "There are two versions of my life."

Sliding Doors.
Schwartzman: Yeah, totally!

And you guys shot it so fast, in a matter of weeks. I do want to ask what it was like to work on such a condensed timeline. It sounds like you're still feeling it.
Schwartzman: It was cool because it's a very ambitious script, very condensed, a lot of stuff to do. This is gonna sound weird. In the first week, the actors had worked really hard trying to be a unit, and we were all getting together, and rehearsing privately, and working with Jesse, and there was so much buildup to this first week. And I remember, one of the second or third days, we had a huge scene, so big that it was all we had planned to shoot that day, and we finished it by, like, one in the afternoon. I think we were so hyped, and focused, and prepared. That happened a few times on this film. Most people, I think, would say, "Oh, you have this many more hours left in your day? Well, let's just fill it with what's for tomorrow. What we're gonna do tomorrow, let's put it here, and let's just keep sliding things up." And I remember driving home one of these days going, like, "We have to release this movie in like five weeks, six weeks. How come I'm going home at 1:30 in the afternoon?" But the truth is that it actually was a great lesson to me. The crew, everyone was working so hard. It gave everyone that little bit of time to prepare for the next day, and to get into sync. It let us go home and work on the lines together, rehearse, you know what I mean? It ended up going faster because we were going with this type of intention and pace. It was really intense, intense, intense days. Not every day is like this, obviously, but I just thought it was an interesting thing that you don't see very often in the workplace. There's a tendency to [think], "If you're not doing something all the time, really hard, that you're burned out, then you're not doing it." It was interesting to do that and to be that efficient. It was cool.

You mentioned that you guys worked hard to establish that group dynamic early on. From my view, these four guys all believe they're underdogs because they came into their wealth independently. But Souper is especially, repeatedly reminded that he's the poorest of the group. He even refers to himself as "the common man" at one point. How do you view Souper's status in this friend group?
Schwartzman: I think he knows that he is a good businessman and is smart. I think he has confidence. I think that he's good socially, I think that he knows a lot of people. He feels very good in his ability to do business, but, just as you say, he keeps hitting a wall and has not cracked this billion. But what I like is that he's so positive.

He's earnest.
Schwartzman: He's really earnest. It's not fake. So he's in this spot where his role is sort of cemented in a way. He's the guy that gets that joke, and that joke, and that joke, but the way he handles it is sad, but also, he values it. It's of value to him. It's odd, but it's of value. I wonder — I could be wrong, but I wonder if you asked him, "Would you prefer a life where you had these three friends and they talked to you the way they did, or not have these three friends and be talked to with total respect by everyone else?" He'd probably say these three friends.

And there's that moment where, after the first attempt to kill Jeff, Souper is telling Randall and Ven about his fear of ending up at a soup kitchen someday, that genuine fear of failure. How did you approach a scene like that, where you had to make that earnestness explicit?
Schwartzman: First of all, I love that scene. I was really just trying to channel, "Please don't let Jesse be let down." Because you read it, and you're like, "This is really wonderful." It's a real telling moment for this character. It has a lot of elements. One is, "Did I just get hung out to dry, basically, over here with our friend? Why me? Do you think I'm not smart?" But then he goes from being angry to not feeling sorry. Like, "I'm doing everything. What am I not doing right?" It's not a hope, he's not defeated, he's just like, "Tell me what to do." But he's not resigned. He's almost more filled with this crazy energy. So it's like a combination of that: feeling like you've been deserted, and at the same time, feeling like you're happy to have been included to be deserted.

Mountainhead is now streaming on Max.